Catch Up Support

In June 2020 the government announced a £1 billion nationwide package of funding to ‘tackle the impact of lost teaching time.’ Beaumont School has been allocated £80,560, to be received in three tranches over the course of the 2020-21 academic year.

Schools are free to decide how best to use this funding, as long as they do so in accordance with the requirement that it is used to provide activities which will help students in Years 7-11 catch up on missed schooling.

Catch-Up Priorities

Students experienced lockdown in different ways, depending on their circumstances. In deciding how to use catch-up funding, we have attempted to take account of different barriers to learning so that we can support a wide range of students. We have identified the following priorities:

1. A minority of students experienced challenges in keeping up with remote learning, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This is particularly urgent for Year 11 students, whose exams are imminent. It is a priority for us to support them to make up lost ground in key subjects and to secure good outcomes through tuition and other strategies.
2. Evidence suggests that many Year 7 students are behind where we would expect at this stage in terms of literacy and numeracy. It is a priority for us to address this lag, through tuition and other strategies.
3. Although we worked very hard to maintain our full curriculum during lockdown, some activities simply could not be done as effectively as they can in school, especially practical ones. It is a priority for us to enable all students to experience these activities as far as possible within safety restrictions.
4. Even though students are now back in school, ongoing disruptions to face-to-face teaching are frequent as a result of self-isolation. Therefore it is a priority for us to mitigate the impact of these disruptions by providing remote education as effectively as possible.

Use of the Catch-Up Premium

Priority 1: £2835 spent to date

Much of the spending to date has been on online materials to support students with revision of material covered during lockdown. We anticipate the bulk of the remaining funding being spent on this priority, mostly through tuition from external providers and additional sessions delivered by our own teachers. Disadvantaged students are being prioritised for these opportunities.

Priority 2: £11,040 spent to date

This is existing, rather than new, funding, which has been incorporated into the overall catch-up pot. We are using it to provide literacy withdrawal groups and additional teaching assistant support.

Priority 3: £4516 spent to date

Most of this spending has been used to purchase resources to enable students to experience the activities which have not been possible as a result of Covid restrictions e.g. digital theatre productions instead of theatre visits, alternative musical instruments to maintain our broad education in this field.

Priority 4: £3858 spent to date

This spending has largely been on electronic resources to support students who are self-isolating to access the curriculum successfully, especially through live remote lessons when this is the most effective way of making provision for them.

Total spending to date: £22,249

Assessing Impact

Priority 1: Teachers will assess students’ understanding in lessons on a frequent basis and, when tuition is being provided, tutors will also conduct assessment. We will get a more formal idea of impact when we gather more formal assessment data for reporting to parents. Ultimately the most useful way of determining impact will come in the summer exams.

Priority 2: We conduct a formal baseline assessment when students start Year 7. This gives us a starting point against which we can assess subsequent progress. This will be done through informal assessment by teachers, reading age scores and more formal tests, such as the end of year exams in English and Maths.

Priority 3: This will be assessed by the extent to which students are able to participate in the full range of activities and their attainment in class assessments and more formal exams in the relevant subjects.

Priority 3: This will be assessed partly through successful completion of work when students are self-isolating. A more attainment-based assessment can come through scores in class tests and more formal exams for the year groups.

Use of the 16-19 Tuition Funding

In addition to the main catch-up funding, there is an additional, much-smaller, pot of money, which is ring-fenced for the provision of tuition to Sixth Form students who did not achieve grades 4 or above in English and Maths as the first priority, followed by those who did not achieve grades 5 or above. Beaumont School has been allocated £2685 for this purpose. 12 students have been identified for tuition initially, and we plan to start this in the Spring Term 2021. Impact will be assessed through a combination of classroom-based testing, assessment by the tutors and exams in the summer (external for Year 13 and internal for Year 12).  For more information, please click here

Use of the Summer School Funding

We were very pleased to be able to offer a place on our ‘Mission Transition’ Summer School programme to all students in our 2021-22 Year 7 intake. The aim of the programme was to: 

• help build a sense of community for students
• enable students to build relationships with key staff and familiarise themselves with their new school environment
• support pupils’ wellbeing and personal development
• support with key areas of the curriculum, including numeracy and literacy, to make it easier for students to access the secondary curriculum.

We were pleased with the uptake, and the programme reached just over 160 of our newest students. Students benefited from:

• exciting sessions with external partners, including Trestle Theatre and Beat Goes On.
• team building sessions including physical education, sport and outdoor education
• creative opportunities including Art, Drama and Music
• wider curriculum activities, including languages, numeracy, literacy and reading

The Summer School was funded by the government. Details of our spend as a school can be found in the table below: